


To Die by a Femur

by simone



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Ending: Swan Song, Character Death, Heaven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-20
Updated: 2013-02-20
Packaged: 2017-11-29 22:11:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/692046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simone/pseuds/simone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An alternate ending to Swan Song: Sam, Dean, Cas, and Bobby aren't so lucky this time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Die by a Femur

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my lovely co-author Bella (sam-body), who does not yet have an A03 account. Enjoy. c:

There never was any hope of salvation for mankind. Dean had it in his mind that he and his brother would find a way, like they always did, but when you’re up against the big guns, with nothing but an old drunk and a half-assed angel for back-up, sometimes you have to take the blows and realize that saving the earth isn’t always your damn responsibility. Fighting a pissy, rebellious angel who jacked up a thousand human souls didn’t exactly fit the quota for the Winchesters’ lower level pay grade. It didn’t fit anyone’s paygrade. No one knew how the Winchesters had gotten sucked in so far.   
           

The only thing keeping Dean from falling over was the grip of the worn down leather steering wheel, and a dim hope that there was even something left that could be saved. Not himself, no, he had been to Hell and lived to tell the story once already– there was no saving his eternal fate. And not Sam either, though that realization ripped at him interminably, clawing at his heart and his lungs and screaming _you failed_ and _your little brother will never be saved_. He had failed his father, that much was inevitable and had been for a while, right when the tainted blood first coursed through Sammy’s veins, as soon as they had come up with this stupid, go-for-broke, hail-mary plan.  
           

What kind of idiot sets out to stop the Devil from bringing on the apocalypse? The feat was not even remotely possible, and success was not in their favor. Cas didn’t think they could do it. God, if he even existed, certainly wasn’t banking on the salvation of mankind. Bobby was just cleaning up the mess his boys had made, and the good lord only knew what John would’ve said if he was still alive, dead in the place of Dean himself. Hell, the plan had failed already, on the first go. The Devil had eaten Sam alive without a second thought, within a moment of invading his body and stomping down his soul into the deepest corner of his own meatsuit.   
           

Dean stepped out of the Impala, the door creaking shut behind him. The Devil looked amused, at best.  
           

“Well, looks like we have company,” murmured Lucifer calmly, cocking Sam’s head and dipping his doe eyes to look straight into Dean’s set jaw. With a flick of his hand, the hunter was pinned to the hood of the car, arms splayed and fear glinting wildly in his green eyes. He stepped forward calmly, surveying the Winchester boy’s absolute surrender; _he would kill him in his own brother’s body_. There was a certain sense of accomplishment in the Devil’s hard eyes–Sammy’s eyes– as he realized this– his first triumph after millennia of being trapped in that shithole of a flaming cage. “What hope did you think you had, showing up here, Dean?” He turned his body, waving his arm at the scattering of bodies standing behind Adam, Michael’s vessel. “They certainly came for different reasons.”  
           

Dean bit the inside of his cheek hard, drawing blood as he sucked in the tears at the sight of the ripped and shredded corpses. Bobby’s blue hat lay crumpled in the dead grass, bloodied and battered like his body. Cas was nothing but a pile of bleached bones folded amongst a dirty trench coat and an unraveled blue tie, his angel knife discarded to the side, shining in the harsh sunlight. He thought of Lisa and Ben, wondering if they would survive any longer than he would. He thought that he could reach the knife if Lucifer turned, but something inside of him realized he would die here today, and any efforts to stop the inevitable would just bring it on faster. He had to be here for Sammy until the end, never once considering that he would have a chance to make it out.   
           

Sam’s face loomed closer as Lucifer made his way towards Dean, shaking against the Impala. “I’m going to kill you,” he said calmly, in Sam’s soft voice, “slowly.”

 

“You know,” he continued, smirking and laughing quietly to himself, “Sam’s in here, screaming his darling little head off, fighting me with every inch of willpower he can muster in his poor, twisted soul.” He exhaled satisfactorily, then pushed up the sleeves of his black shirt, rubbing his hands together and placing one firmly on Dean’s shoulder. Hellfire burned across his body, and he gritted his teeth so fast and so hard that he felt the blood well up in his mouth, felt a chip crack off of one of his molars. The Devil only grinned wider as the smell of burning flesh caught in the afternoon breeze.

 

“He doesn’t want to admit it, but he wants me in here. It’s cozy. It cools his angry heart down. _My_ angry heart, beating with all that hot poison you helped fill him with, Winchester. Remind me to thank you for that someday when you’re rotting away in Hell. You know, you practically handed him over to me.”

           

“Sammy!” Dean screamed, and his voice was rough, grating through his constricted throat.

 

“Sammy, don’t you listen to him. I’m right here.” Lucifer tightened his hold, and Dean could barely get the words out. He would’ve gladly taken Alastair’s tools and tricks for all of eternity in exchange for the absence of his brother’s hand bringing him unimaginable pain. Sam’s face, contorted happily, filling his dripping vision. He burned with the hellfire, angry red and hotter than the sun, creeping up his limbs and undulating out from the center of his chest.   
           

“He says hello, Dean,” the Devil said, with a wink. “He says that he wants me to kill you slowly. He says he wants me to make you pay for dragging him back into this life. For killing Jess. For killing your old man.”  
           

“Don’t–” he gasped, grimacing against the hold he was under. With each breath in, the fire got hotter. The Impala was still running beneath him, humming and oblivious to the waste made of Dean’s body on its hood. The engine burned through the metal of the hood and into his back. Had his skin not already been charred, it would’ve hurt. His anger lit through his green eyes, so bright that they clouded, dark under the afternoon sun. “Don’t you dare say that to me, you self-righteous...”

 

With a whisper, the oxygen was pulled from his lungs. He would never finish. Lucifer laughed, and the sound echoed through the field.

 

“Goodbye, Winchester,” he smiled. “Nothing you say now can save you, or your sad little brother.” For a second, Lucifer pursed Sam’s lips, and something came over his face. His eyes widened, and suddenly the force against his chest was soft and gentle. Dean gasped for air and fought to stand, but collapsed into the dirt of the hard-packed earth, his body all but useless from the fire that had licked away at his flesh and bone.

 

“Dean...?” whispered the boy, standing up and squinting at the gentle sun beating down on the graveyard. He reached forward to help his brother up, shock and innocence plastered across his face as he held Dean’s battered body, his skin hot and red to the touch.

 

“How did you--” Dean began through bleeding, mottled lips, but trailed off as he watched Sam take in the destruction around him, brought on by his own two hands. His face crashed into hopelessness, opening his mouth with no words to speak. Dean reached up to place his hands on his brother’s shoulders. Sam had been taller since his high school graduation. Since they’d both been kids. Before all of this.

 

“Hey,” he muttered, his voice full of pride. . “You’re in control, you beat him!” Nothing else mattered. He reached for the rings of the Horsemen, in his jacket.

 

Sam smiled suddenly, but it was not his own– crooked and full of vengeance. His hazel eye, the right, winked. _Just kidding_. And Sam’s neck was snapped with a jolt, his head turning to the side like a doll in the hands of an angry toddler. He fell to the ground, unmoving.

 

“Sammy!” the hunter cried, broken, curling over the boy’s crumpled frame. He had no tears left to cry on his scarred face. There had been too many funerals already, and his brother wasn’t even going to get one. No one left to see it through.

 

“You know, I’m still here,” said a rough, casual voice. “If you’d just give Lucy a minute to recover, we could get this show on the road.” Michael sat up from where he’d leaned on a crumbling headstone.

 

He continued, “You know, Winchester, I like you. But Adam’s body ain’t half bad!” He dusted his forearm off, scoffing at the hunter’s bloody, indistinguishable face.  “Dean,” he cocked his head sympathetically, “I don’t really _want_ to kill you. Just stay out of the way and _maybe_ you can make it out alive. I hate to say it, but your brother won’t be so lucky...”

 

The body underneath Dean’s laughed, suddenly, and the vertebrae in his little brother’s neck popped back into place with three sickening cracks. “Oh, brother,” Lucifer groaned, tossing Dean to the side as though he were nothing. He landed on his leg beside Bobby’s ripped flesh and felt his bones cripple under his weight. If he wasn’t already half-dead, it might’ve hurt.

 

He tried to stand, to reach for Sam once more, but his leg wouldn’t allow it. So he squirmed , like a half dead Croat toward its dinner. His brother was inside of that monster, he knew it and he knew that he could draw him out. “Oh, for my father’s sake, Dean, stay the hell down!” Michael groaned. Lucifer smiled and picked up Jimmy Novak’s femur, bright white like angel grace, snapping the end off with his teeth so that it formed a sort of stake.

 

He plunged his makeshift weapon into Dean’s stomach almost as an afterthought, pinning him into the ground like a canvas tarp, blood welling up around the wound and dripping onto the earth. The hunter gasped for air, but his body was reduced to nothing. Instead, he saw stars.  Somewhere, what was left of his sarcasm took a deep breath, surveyed his surroundings and thought, _well, it can’t get much worse than this, at least, dying at the femur of a fallen angel_. The hulking, blurry vessels of the Devil and his brother finally turned to face one another.

 

And with a blinding flash of light, and several eviscerating war cries, the world he knew erupted in a catastrophic white light. If he hadn’t already been dead, he would’ve gone blind.

 

The apocalypse had truly begun, and he wasn’t there to stop it. He could hear the resounding cries of the planet as humanity was enveloped in a war not their own. Cities, towns, bones, flattened without a second thought. They wouldn’t know it was Dean’s fault, but still, the guilt was ruining.

 

_“Dean?” a small voice said. “Dean, honey, are you waking up?” He could’ve sworn it was Jo. He would’ve bet what was left of his soul on it._

_“Give him some space, lovebird,” a grating, older one replied, but it was half amused. Almost...happy, in the dreariest sense of the term. The glugs of liquid from a glass bottle over ice filled his ears. The homely smell of rich whiskey filled his head._

_“Why is he taking longer to wake up then I did?” questioned a much more familiar voice. It reminded him of something that stirred within in him, crawling to the surface of his forgotten soul. Reminding the hunter of hotel rooms and forgotten Christmas and cramming army men into ashtrays and carving their ownership into leather trim. It was followed by the sounds of fabric moving and a couple chairs scooting across the floor towards where he lay, unable to move, to make sense of his surroundings._ __  
  


_“Well, you got your neck snapped, Sam. Dean was literally burned to death, broken, and then stabbed, that’s got to cause a lot more damn pain, and a longer recovery.” That was definitely Jo’s voice, he was sure of it, fretting over every injury on his legs and chest with soft, small hands. With slow surety, he opened his eyes, blinking rapidly and sucking in a breath through hollowed cheeks. The sound of feet jumping to the floor echoed in his ears and suddenly four pairs of eyes were peering over him, cautious, anxiously waiting._ __  
  


_“Dean?” Ellen murmured, enveloping his rough hand in her own. He melted into the touch, closing his eyes for a brief moment as he let one subtle tear drip from the corner of his eye and slide into the hair of his sideburns._ __  
  


_Cold water splashed his face next, and Dean jolted completely awake, gasping and sitting up rigidly on the rickety bar table. “What the hell was that, Sam?!” he barked, annoyance dripping from his words._ __  
  


_“Dunno,” his little brother said, and smiled mischievously. “Guess we had to make sure you weren’t a demon or something.”_ __  
  


_Ellen scoffed and pointed at Bobby. “It was that old coot’s idea. We’re in heaven for god’s sake, ain’t no demons around these parts.”_ __  
  


_Jo punched Sam’s shoulder, hard, and took a seat on a waxy bar stool. “Sorry, we’re still trying to fix that one. Old habits die hard, I guess.”_ __  
  


_Dean shrugged. “What’s a little holy water?”_ __  
  


_With a bang, the door to the resurrected bar burst open. Everyone jumped, and the men in the room reached for guns too routine to give up, though they would never come to use again._

_Cas walked through the doorframe, in a rush of messy hair and blue eyes. “You know, I’ve been to heaven plenty of times before, but I’ve never been actually dead here. The food is honestly to DIE for.”_

_No one spoke, unsure if Cas was making a joke or not. Ellen cleared her throat quietly. But the angel smiled and shrugged off the discomfort, slipping a brown paper bag out from under his arm. “I come bearing cheeseburgers.” He grinned widely, and set the grease-spotted package down on the table, where Ash moved forward to pull out a hot sandwich, digging in with gold-capped teeth and his usual 5 o’clock shadow._ __  
  


_“So, this is heaven, huh?” Dean began, surveying  the wood furnishings of the bar and the gentle sunlight streaming in from the windows. The dust that had filtered through the glowing rays– back in reality– was long gone, but there wasn’t a part of him that despised the clarity of the warm air around him._ __  
  


_“Yeah, Dean, I guess you just couldn’t stay away,” Jo joked, bumping him with her elbow, the corners of her eyes creasing up. Her eyes welled with tears– everyone was holding back tears but Bobby and Cas, indifferent to polite affections._ __  
  


_Castiel was too busy eating all sixteen of the cheeseburgers he’d brought to deal with niceties._

_Bobby was too busy smiling gruffly at his makeshift family to even consider the nostalgia of it all._

_Dean swallowed the knot in his throat, and stood up to make himself a drink at the bar, uncapping a beer for himself and for Sammy, who took the cool bottle with the ease of familiarity in his grip._

_“So I guess heaven is just us together,” Bobby grumbled. “Stuck with you idjits for eternity, just my luck.”_

_Sam laughed lightheartedly, tipping back his bottle in a long sip. “The world might’ve been reduced to ashes, but at least heaven’s still intact. And as long as we’re together...”_

_“Yeah, Sammy. As long as we’re together.”_

_A breeze blew through the bar, and the keys to the Impala jingled interminably where they hung on the wall. The motley group raised their glasses and toasted to failure._


End file.
